Biography

German Expressionist poet and dramatist whose work is a protest against bourgeois materialism and the war-making state.

While serving in the German army during World War I, Hasenclever feigned mental illness and was discharged. He was presented with the Kleist Prize for his passionate adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone After the war he became interested in mysticism, occultism, and Buddhism. He worked from 1924 to 1928 in Paris as correspondent for a Berlin newspaper, and from 1929 to 1932 he was a scriptwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, living in Berlin but traveling frequently throughout Europe and North Africa.

When the National Socialists took power in 1933, his works were banned, burnt during the book burning, then removed from libraries. Hasenclever went into exile in Nice. In 1934, he married Edith Schläfer there.

During the Second World War Hasenclever was imprisoned twice as a "foreign enemy" in France. When France fell to Germany, he was in the prison camp of Camp des Milles in the South East of France. In the early hours of 22 June 1940 he took his own life with an overdose of thebarbiturate Veronal, so as not to fall into the hands of the Nazis.

Since 1996 the Walter Hasenclever Prize has been awarded to a German-language writer every two years.